A family with distant branches
Spoken in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and nearby areas, the Apache languages have relatives thousands of kilometres to the north. The reason is that they belong to the Southern Athabaskan language family, the southernmost large cluster in a family whose other members are found in Alaska, northwestern Canada and along the Pacific Coast of Oregon and California. This kinship is among the best documented facts in the study of Native American languages, and it is the main reason that researchers talk about a past movement of Athabaskan-speaking people into the Southwest.
The family is often called Athabaskan or Athapaskan, and many speakers of northern members prefer the word Dene, which in several of those languages means “people.”
The branches of Athabaskan
Linguists usually divide the Athabaskan family into three geographic groups.
- Northern Athabaskan. This is by far the largest group in terms of number of languages. It covers interior Alaska and much of northwestern Canada, and its members include languages such as Gwich’in, Koyukon and Dene Suline. The Northern Athabaskan peoples are numerous and varied.
- Pacific Coast Athabaskan. A small set of languages once spoken in parts of Oregon and northern California, including Hupa and Tolowa. They are separated from the northern group by a large distance.
- Southern Athabaskan, or Apachean. The Navajo language and the Apache languages: Western Apache, Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan and Plains Apache.
The Navajo Nation is a separate nation, not an Apache one, but its language is the closest relative of the Apache languages, and the two groups have long been described together as Apachean peoples. The article on Apache and Navajo kinship looks at the historical ties between them. Here the point is linguistic: Navajo and the Apache languages are more similar to one another than either is to any northern language.
How this shows a shared history
When languages are related, comparing their words and grammar can show how long ago they split. Two patterns stand out in Athabaskan.
First, the northern languages are far more diverse than the southern ones. When a family has its greatest internal variety in one region, that region is usually where the family has been spoken for the longest time. By this reasoning, the Athabaskan homeland is generally placed in the north, in or near the area of Alaska and the Yukon.
Second, the Apachean languages resemble each other far more than the northern languages resemble each other. Languages that spread recently into a new area tend to have had less time to diverge. This supports the view that the Southern Athabaskan languages share a relatively recent common ancestor. Beyond this, the timing is argued over. Scholars have proposed different dates and routes for the move south, and the question of the Apachean migration remains debated rather than settled. Apache peoples also have their own oral accounts of origin and emergence, which are not framed as linguistic hypotheses and are understood on their own terms.
Shared features across the family
A speaker of Navajo, Western Apache or a Northern Athabaskan language would find many structural echoes in the others, even though speech would not be mutually understood. Features often described as typical of the family include the following.
- A verb-centred grammar in which a stem is surrounded by a chain of prefixes marking person, number, aspect and other details.
- Distinct “classificatory” verb stems that vary according to the shape or kind of object being handled, for example whether it is round, long or flexible.
- Glottalized consonants and, in many languages, tone.
- A relatively small stock of core vocabulary that can be matched across the family through regular sound changes. Words for “water,” “fire” and body parts are among those linguists have compared.
Some of these features are explored for the Apache languages in the article on the Apache sound system and in the guide to Apache languages and dialects.
Na-Dene and wider claims
Athabaskan itself is part of a larger grouping. Most specialists accept that Athabaskan is related to Eyak, a language of southern Alaska, forming Athabaskan-Eyak. Eyak is a notable case for the topic of language loss: its last fluent native speaker died in 2008, and community efforts have continued since, based on recordings and documentation.
Tlingit, spoken on the Alaska coast, is generally linked to the Athabaskan-Eyak group in a wider Na-Dene family, though that connection is more distant and has been discussed more critically than the Athabaskan-Eyak link.
A more recent proposal, the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, suggests a link between the Na-Dene languages and the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia. It was presented in the 2000s by linguist Edward Vajda and has drawn serious interest, along with debate. Some specialists find the evidence persuasive, others remain cautious. If it holds up, it would be unusual: a link between language families on two continents. Readers should treat it as an open question rather than an accepted fact.
What the family tells us, and what it does not
The linguistic kinship is solid evidence that the ancestors of the Apache languages once shared a speech community with the ancestors of the northern languages. It does not, by itself, give a date, a route or details of how people lived. Language relationships and genetic or archaeological relationships do not always match, and speakers can shift languages without moving. For the broader picture of how scholars use several kinds of evidence together, see the material on archaeological evidence and Apache origins elsewhere on this site.
For the Apache nations today, the family tree is a reminder that their languages are part of a very old and wide network. It also explains why a Western Apache learner and a speaker of a distant northern Dene language may notice shared patterns, even though neither will follow the other’s speech. Those patterns are a linguistic legacy older than any recorded history.